How to move OS, Office, and Paint Shop to SSD from Hard Drive?

[Renorei]

Hi, I am currently running a computer with this hard drive and mobo:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152185
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128412R

I have this SSD which I hope to use as my boot disk (running Windows 7 Ultimate) with a microsata adapter. I'd also like to put some applications on it like MS Office and Paint Shop Pro. I already have these applications on my hard drive.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148358


Unfortunately fresh installs are not an option in my case. So I will have to resort to some kind of cloning procedure to get the OS and applications onto the SSD. Been doing some research and a lot of people have been saying that cloning something from a hard drive to an SSD is a bad idea and that a fresh install is pretty much the only way to go. But as I said, not an option in my case.

So what should I do? Surely there is a way to get all that stuff from the hard drive to the SSD without running into partition issues, causing the OS to be wonky, or shortening the lifespan of the SSD.

 

[sminlal]

I was able to move a Windows 7 system from a hard drive to an SSD using the built-in "System Image" backup. I backed up to an external drive, burned a recovery DVD, shut down and swapped HDD/SSD, booted from the recovery DVD and restored from the external drive. It worked flawlessly.

 

[geofelt]

Acronis true image has a clone utility that I have used several times to clone a hard drive to a SSD, and vice versa.
They have a free trial which you could use, but I liked the utility enough to buy the cd version.

You might have to unload sufficient data off of the 1tb drive first, to allow all of the os and apps to fit on the smaller ssd.

One consideration is that you will want to have AHCI enabled in the bios (not raid or IDE) for the sata drives. In conjunction with windows-7 drivers, it will enable the "trim " command passthru. "trim" is important to keep SSD performance good as the drive gets filled up with writes. Unfortunately, it is not easy to change to AHCI if W7 was not installed with it initially. There are procedures to do this involving registry editing.

 

[Mfusick]

I was able to move a Windows 7 system from a hard drive to an SSD using the built-in "System Image" backup. I backed up to an external drive, burned a recovery DVD, shut down and swapped HDD/SSD, booted from the recovery DVD and restored from the external drive. It worked flawlessly.

wow.

Could I move my system to a new drive by doing this?

 

[sminlal]

As I said, I moved my system from a hard drive to an SSD. That's a different drive. Yes, it worked just fine.